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Moving beyond a cisgender, heteronormative framework, this book investigates Shakespeare's queer legacy on Emily Dickinson's work, particularly how this legacy has inflected Dickinson's queer world-making and her conception not only of gender and sexuality, but also of the lyric itself. Drawing on Francophone and Anglophone scholarship on lyric poetry as well as a wide range of academic research on Dickinson and Shakespeare, queer studies, intermedial studies and theatre studies,
Emily Dickinson and Shakespeare: Queer Legacies and Queer World-Making argues that if Dickinson does indeed inscribe herself into a hegemonic white culture by tracing this Shakespearean legacy, she does so by exploring themes like deviance, a refusal of normativity in all its forms, and by complicating gender and racial constructions. Theatre, and Shakespearean theatricality in particular, is the spring of Dickinson's lyric energy. As a transformative, open space, the theatre is the core structure that intersects with her poetry and the vital force that provides lyric momentum. It is what queers her conception of the lyric. This study contributes to existing scholarship on theories of the lyric by bringing previously untranslated French writing on the lyric to Anglophone readers for the first time, and by combining several critical and textual approaches.
List of contents
Introduction
Chapter 1 - "A woman - white - to be": the performance of lyric selfhood
Chapter 2 - Queer lyric embodiment
Chapter 3 - Dickinson's queer lyric: playing at paste, queer apprenticeship and queer editorial practices
Chapter 4 - Emily Dickinson's "theatre of matter," Act One: alteration, alterity, and the necessity of queer lyric reading
Chapter 5 - Emily Dickinson's "Theatre of Matter," Act Two: Matter in Motion, Queer Clinamens, Dickinson and Shakespeare's Lucretian Poetics.
Chapter 6 - Performing transition*
Coda
About the author
Adeline Chevrier-Bosseau is associate professor of American Literature and Dance Studies at Sorbonne Université and a junior member of the IUF (Institut Universitaire de France). She has published the first queer translation of a selection of Emily Dickinson's poems into French (Classiques Garnier, 2025), as well as several peer-reviewed articles in international academic journals on Emily Dickinson, American dance, 19th-century American poetry and dance, and Shakespeare and dance. Her first collection of poems,
First Blood, is available from Slub Press.
Summary
Moving beyond a cisgender, heteronormative framework, this book investigates Shakespeare’s queer legacy on Emily Dickinson’s work, particularly how this legacy has inflected Dickinson’s queer world-making and her conception not only of gender and sexuality, but also of the lyric itself.
